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BREAKING: President Trump has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, accusing the agency of leaking his tax returns and other confidential information involving him, his family, and the Trump Organization to media outlets.
BREAKING: President Trump has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, accusing the agency of leaking his tax returns and other confidential information involving him, his family, and the Trump Organization to media outlets.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Legal experts say President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax information raises a plethora of legal and ethical questions, including the propriety of the leader of the executive branch pursuing scorched-earth litigation against the very government he is in charge of.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Florida, includes the president’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric as plaintiffs. It alleges that the leak of Trump’s and the Trump Organization’s confidential tax records caused “reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing.”
In 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn, of Washington, D.C. — who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense and national security tech firm — was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking tax information about Trump and others to two news outlets between 2018 and 2020.
The outlets were not named in the charging documents, but the description and time frame align with stories about Trump’s tax returns in The New York Times and reporting about wealthy Americans’ taxes in the nonprofit investigative journalism organization ProPublica. The 2020 New York Times report found Trump paid $750 in federal income tax the year he first entered the White House and no income tax at all some years thanks to reported colossal losses.
Legal analysts say that Trump does have a legitimate claim against the IRS but question the amount he is seeking as well as his decision to pursue the case at all. The disclosure violated IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal statute, which provides a legal remedy for individuals whose tax information is leaked, including a minimum of $1,000 per disclosure.
